The Forecast is Hurricane

2019 ◽  
pp. 193-210
Author(s):  
Sheila Murnaghan ◽  
Deborah H. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Louise Gluck ◽  
Carol Ann Duffy ◽  
Female Figures ◽  
Female Writers

Along with its heroine Penelope, the Odyssey presents an array of ‘other women’, female figures such as the Sirens, Calypso, and Circe, who impede Odysseus’ progress and stand as rivals to Penelope, but who cannot prevent Odysseus’ return to his much-prized wife. In this chapter, we consider the legacy of these figures, and especially of Circe, in poems by modern and contemporary female writers, including Margaret Atwood, H.D., Carol Ann Duffy, Louise Glück, Linda Pastan, and Augusta Davies Webster. While these authors may differ in their stances towards feminist politics and efforts to define a feminist poetics, their choice to speak through mythical figures who have considerable powers but are ultimately sidelined and abandoned yields searching, often sharply critical accounts of ancient and modern gender arrangements.

Monologue and Dialogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 177-192
Author(s):  
Isobel Hurst
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Dramatic Monologue ◽  
Louise Gluck ◽  
Carol Ann Duffy ◽  
Canonical Text ◽  
Dramatic Monologues

With the telling and retelling of stories by the narrator and characters, Homer’s Odyssey seems to invite the reworking of episodes and characters in new forms. Modern poets favour the dramatic monologue for entering into dialogue with a revered canonical text, often in an irreverent or subversive manner. Dramatic monologues are crucial to the revisionist mythology of women writers, often representing female characters who are peripheral and largely silent in classical texts in order to articulate some element of the story that was previously untold. Poets such as Linda Pastan, Carol Ann Duffy, Louise Glück, and Judith Kazantzis use monologue and dialogue to create reworkings of the Odyssey that relocate Odysseus to the margins of the story and question the importance of his heroic adventures.

scholarly journals Breaking the Spell of the Male Gaze in Selected Women's Ekphrastic Poems.

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (37) ◽  
pp. 20
Author(s):  
Shaymaa Zuhair Al-Wattar
Keyword(s):  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
Rita Dove ◽  
Word And Image ◽  
Carol Ann Duffy ◽  
Strong Position ◽  
Male Dominated ◽  
Hunting Ground

For centuries art and poetry have been inspiring each other and the relation between word and image constantly fascinates the poets. The literary world has given poems that tackle artwork the name: ekphrasis. Ekphrasis represents a rich hunting ground for references, allusions, and inspiration for poets. However, ekphrasis is powerfully gendered that privileged male gaze. Traditionally, the male is given the strong position as the gazer, while the woman is locked in her predetermined role that of the beautiful, silent, submissive, gazed upon.             Women poets refuse to adhere to the gendered ekphrastic tradition and the under-representation of women in ekphrastic poetry. They strongly challenged the ekphrasis tradition modifying it to create a distinctive feminist ekphrasis. Their poetry changes the male-dominated ekphrsis tradition that for centuries has pervaded the Western cultures. The work of the poets Louise Bogan,Carol Ann Duffy, Rita Dove, and Margaret Atwood is an excellent example of women's ekphrastic poetry that defies the tradition of patriarchal male gaze in an attempt to break the spell of the male gaze.

‘Here in India’: Nineteenth-Century British Women Navigating their Position in the Empire through Children's Literature

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-185
Author(s):  
Jesse Aberbach
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Infants And Children ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Maternal Roles ◽  
Female Writers ◽  
And Control ◽  
Botanical Study

This article considers how the children's books written by two nineteenth-century female writers, Eliza Tabor and Mary Martha Sherwood, when they accompanied their husbands to India, enabled them to navigate this new environment and their position as respectable middle-class women while revealing how India was deemed a place where British childhood was impossible. Just as many women took up botanical study to legitimise their ‘otherwise transgressive presence in imperial spaces’ (McEwan 219), writing for children enabled others to engage with the masculine world of travelling and earning money without compromising their femininity. Addressing their work to children also seems to have helped both writers to deal with the absence of their own children: the Indian climate made it impossibly challenging for most British infants and children. In this way their writing gives expression to what might be termed a crisis of imperial motherhood. Underlying the texts is an anxiety relating to British settlement and an attempt to comprehend and control a place that threatened their maternal roles.

A Compact Embodiment of Pluralities and Denial of Origins: Atwood’s The Year of The Flood

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 141
Author(s):  
Rana Sağıroğlu
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Why Questions ◽  
Near Future

Margaret Atwood, one of the most spectacular authors of postmodern movement, achieved to unite debatable and in demand critical points of 21st century such as science fiction, postmodernism and ecocriticism in the novel The Year of The Flood written in 2009. The novel could be regarded as an ecocritical manifesto and a dystopic mirror against today’s degenerated world, tending to a superficial base to keep the already order in use, by moving away from the fundamental solution of all humanity: nature. Although Atwood does not want her works to be called science fiction, it is obvious that science fiction plays an introductory role and gives the novel a ground explaining all ‘why’ questions of the novel. However, Atwood is not unjust while claiming that her works are not science fiction because of the inevitable rapid change of 21st century world becoming addicted to technology, especially Internet. It is easily observed by the reader that what she fictionalises throughout the novel is quite close to possibility, and the world may witness in the near future what she creates in the novel as science fiction. Additionally, postmodernism serves to the novel as the answerer of ‘how’ questions: How the world embraces pluralities, how heterogeneous social order is needed, and how impossible to run the world by dichotomies of patriarchal social order anymore. And lastly, ecocriticism gives the answers of ‘why’ questions of the novel: Why humanity is in chaos, why humanity has organized the world according to its own needs as if there were no living creatures apart from humanity. Therefore, The Year of The Flood meets the reader as a compact embodiment of science fiction, postmodernism and ecocriticism not only with its theme, but also with its narrative techniques.

THE FEATURES OF FEMALE IMAGES IN THE TRAGEDIES OF GUSEYN JAVID

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 180-188
Author(s):  
Malika Adigezalova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Female Characters ◽  
Female Images ◽  
Female Figures ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
The Given

The article is devoted to the features of female types in the tragedies of one of significant playwrights of the XX century Guseyn Javid. In the given article, they analyse and compare the characteristic features and behavior of the female figures of the author’s such literaryworks as «Mother»(Selma, Ismet), «Maral»(Maral, Humay), «Afet»(Afet, Alagoz), «Siyavush»(Farangiz, Sudaba). The basis of the article lies in the creative works of G.Javid, where special attention is attracted by several types of female characters, among which the types of a traditional eastern woman are most brightly represented

Feminist Shakespeares: Adapting Shakespeare for a Modern Audience in the Hogarth Shakespeare Project

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colleen Etman
Keyword(s):  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Adaptation Theory ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Female Authors ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Female Characterization

The Hogarth Shakespeare Project presents a way to view Shakespeare’s plays through a different lens. These books allow for a feminist reading of Shakespeare, looking at some of Shakespeare’s ill-treated female characters to construct a new idea of female characterization. Three of the plays adapted, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and The Taming of the Shrew, were adapted by female authors. By investigating how these plays are being adapted for a more contemporary audience, with modern conceptions of feminism and gender roles, we can gain insight as to how these concepts have changed since Shakespeare’s time. By looking at these modern adaptations, we can interrogate how modern audiences as a whole conceptualize and, potentially, idealize Shakespeare, as well as understanding the progression of treatment of women in contemporary culture since Shakespeare’s time. The novels addressed in this project are The Gap of Time by Jeannette Winterson, Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood, and Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler. The project concludes that, of the three, Vinegar Girl does the most effective job addressing the problematic aspects of its adapted play in a new way, distinguishing it from previous adaptations of The Taming of the Shrew. This project also investigates the role that adaptation theory plays in addressing Shakespeare adaptations, particularly the Hogarth Shakespeare Project.

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